Saturday, December 12, 2009

Before a feature is added in Dolphin, it is checked whether the feature is mandatory for Dolphin’s target user group. If this is not the case, it does not mean that the feature cannot be added; first it must be clarified whether the feature might be non-intrusive and adds a value for users outside the primary target user group. Non-intrusive is mainly related to the user interface. A feature that adds a lot of clutter to the main menu, context menus or toolbar might harm the target user group. In this case the feature will not be added.

A good example of a feature that is non-intrusive is the embedded terminal in Dolphin. It only requires one entry inside a sub menu, but adds great value for a lot of people that are not in the scope of Dolphin’s target user group.

Another kind of non-intrusive feature will be available for Dolphin in KDE SC 4.4: version control support. In KDE 4.4 at least a plugin for Subversion is given:

The version state emblems and additional entries in the context menu will only be shown if a directory is under version control, so this feature fulfills the requirements for being non-intrusive. The plugin still has a lot of rough edges and has mainly been written for testing the plugin interface. Still I use it regularly and it fulfills most of my needs.

It is possible for developers to write other version control plugins for Git, Mercurial or whatever, just by following the instructions given in the plugin interface. In KDE SC 4.5 it is planned to embed the plugins as part of the kdevplatform package, but this has not been finally decided yet. The benefit to offer the plugins as part of kdevplatform will be, that the existing infrastructure for version control integration can be reused by the plugins.

Big thanks go to Nuno Pinheiro, who created icons for the version control states!